Need a friendly community to accelerate your tech knowledge? A place where people with aligned values come together to share, collaborate and learn? DWeb Bay Area might just be your place.

Join us Tuesday February 11, 6:00 PM-9 PM at the awesome headquarters of the Internet Archive in SF, for dinner, networking, and demos of the latest Decentralized, Local First Solutions. We'll be focusing on local-first technology, where data stays on user devices rather than relying on cloud infrastructure. Whether you're a developer, entrepreneur, or tech enthusiast, this DWeb Meetup is for those passionate about privacy, resilience, and user empowerment in software design. We're buiding a better web where users own their data and the devices they run on.

What to Expect:

• Talks on decentralized architectures, edge computing, and peer-to-peer networks
• Demos of local-first apps, offline-first databases, and self-hosted alternatives
• Discussions on privacy-first principles, self-sovereignty, and reducing dependency on solutions that hold all the control
• Networking with like-minded tech professionals & open-source contributors

DEMOS BY:

TINY SSB -- by Christian Tschudin -- tinySSB is an evolving prototype featuring secure text/voice/sketch/location-enabled chat, Kanban board, games on your smartphone, all based on the venerable Secure Scuttlebutt (SSB) approach of append-only logs. As such it inherits most of SSB's security properties, is staunchly offline-first and deliberately connection-less, but is specifically redesigned for narrow-band data replication and meshing with barebones communication means (Bluetooth Low Energy, LoRa, amateur radio, USB sticks - no Internet required).

Narrow-band is desirable, both in practice/emergency situations but also as a research vector for identifying minimal communication requirements (as a healthy exercise in Internet detox). tinySSB invites developers and students to absorb Conflict-free Replicated Data Types (CRDT) concepts and to apply them beyond chat, and especially to look into productivity apps (shared editing of text, graphics and spreadsheets) as well as CRDT-based token systems.

BASIC.TECH - by Rashid Aziz and Abhi CVK, founders

The best parts of the internet at open-source, from email to the most recent release of Deepseek. Developers have occasionally built open-source applications, but data storage has historically been closed-sourced. Applications own your data (e.g., Facebook / Twitter, medical records, financial data), and it remains siloed behind walled gardens.

Technologies like blockchain have attempted to chip away at this problem by providing a transparent and verifiable solution, but huge parts of the internet remain un-penetrated because they are private, not public. For example, company documents, personal family photos and sensitive information do not belong on a blockchain.

In our talk, we will envision with you our proposed solution of user-owned data stores, explore how they are cost effective, performant, and how they complement local-first sync.

BUBBLE -- by Justin Fairchild Bubble is a self-hostable, isomorphic, responsive, modern Javascript blog+forum+wiki+mail server designed to help small communities organize and accomplish their mission. Its goal is to make it radically easier to start your own cultural garden on the Web, outside of the media-surveillance complex. Justin Fairchild is an engineer focused on web application architecture and security.

📍 Location: Internet Archive, 300 Funston Avenue, San Francisco
📅 Date & Time: Tuesday, February 11, 2025, 6-9 PM

KEY SPEAKERS

Rashid Aziz and Abhi CVK, founders Basic.tech

Rashid and Abhi are ex-YC founders who met 10 years ago during undergrad, and are back to work on 3rd startup together.

https://github.com/hellorashid/

Christian Tschudin is a professor in Computer Science at the University
of Basel, Switzerland. He graduaded in math before doing a PhD in
computer science at the University of Geneva on dynamically composed
protocol stacks and active networking. After a PostDoc at ICSI
(Berkeley) he had a tenured position at Uppsala University in Sweden.
His research interests have been in packet dynamics (chemically inspired
networking protocols), content-centric networking, specifically Named
Function Networking, and more recently on minimalistic replication-based
alternatives to the Internet. His current research project is on
"unstoppable computing" which is another word for "cypherpunk for code
execution".

YOUR HOSTS

We are the organizers of the Bay Area node of the DWeb, a global community connecting the people, projects and protocols essential to building a decentralized web. A web that is more private, reliable, secure and open. We host monthly meetups, usually on the 2nd Tuesday at the Internet Archive Headquarters, twice monthly Tools & Weaving Potlucks at homes in SF, and a monthly discussion group in Oakland.

--Steve Elleman, Day Waterbury, Wendy Hanamura

Read about the DWeb Principles here.

Learn more about our DWeb Global community here.

AGENDA

6:00 PM = Welcome drinks, food & networking

6:30 PM = Presentations Begin

7:30 PM = More Lightning Talks from the audience

8:00 PM = More dinner, networking, and sharing.